THE ART OF ROY CARRUTHERS

A dear friend of mine gave me this article written by their friend and wife to artist Roy Carruthers..  It was New York in the late Seventies when I first saw a Roy Carruthers painting.  It put a smile on my face then and continues to do so today.

By Valerie Carruthers

For more than forty years now Roy Carruthers has been creating paintings and sculptures that continue to amuse, fascinate and perplex viewers, infatuate art collectors and defy easy categorization by an art-world used to pinning labels on movements and trends.
His name conjures up a world of iconic figures whose faces and forms may
reference Easter Island carvings yet whose appearance, mood and setting come directly from the boardroom or the boutique. Business suited men and lingerie clad women smoke cigars and sit opposite one another at the poker table, their expressions appropriately poker faced.
Placed in surreal settings or enigmatic situations the oddly proportioned inhabitants of Carruthers paintings mirror western culture’s social programming or lack thereof. Don’t think you’ve got them pegged, though. Carruthers’ art works deftly sidestep easy interpretation. Do the figures’ small heads, topping long necks and wide shoulders mean that western society is small minded?  Do their hands have six or seven fingers because they are greedy and over-grasping? Or is Carruthers, given his endless explorations of the human form, just playing with our heads?
Carruthers has long held his artistic ground despite frequent comparisons to the figurative painter Fernando Botero, not totally surprising given that both masters enjoy messing around with form in a large-scale way. The difference between their works, however, is as substantial as the figures they paint.
Consider that Botero’s brushstrokes are loose, even coarse; the figures “squeezably soft” and he positions his art in the lineage of Old Masters such as Rembrandt.
By contrast, Carruthers’ steely forms are meticulously rendered with virtually invisible brushstrokes. His personal heroes are 20th century legends: British eccentric painter Sir Stanley Spencer, French surrealist Fernand Leger, the German formalist painters Konrad Klapheck and Frederich Meckseper and portrait photographer August Sander. Over the decades their diverse influences have challenged, shaped and replenished Carruthers’ vision.
At 70, with a long string of sold-out solo exhibitions in major U.S. art centers and scads of awards for his advertising art direction, graphic design and magazine illustration from the Sixties to the Eighties, Carruthers continues to explore new dimensions for his art.

Bio

Born in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. Education: Technical Col of Art School, Port Elizabeth, South Africa, 1956. Teaching: School of Visual Arts, NY, 1975. Awards: Am Inst of Graphic Art, 1973; Gold Medal Soc of Illustrators, 1973. Collections: Ulrich Mus, Wichita State Univ, Wichita, KS; Weatherspoon Art Gallery, Univ of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC; Univ of Wyoming, Laramie, WY; Ponce Mus, Ponce, Puerto Rico. Printers: Editions Press, San Francisco, CA (EP)(OB)